


a life lived for art is never a life wasted

by lightsgodown



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Hands, M/M, artist!Cas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 14:58:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/967307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightsgodown/pseuds/lightsgodown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel's hands are meant to create. Dean is sure of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a life lived for art is never a life wasted

Dean is in love with Cas’s hands. That’s it, that’s all there is to it. He loves them.

Sometimes, when Cas thinks Dean is asleep in bed, he trails his fingers down Dean’s chest, tracing patterns across his skin.  Then he presses them to his own lips and marks the place directly above Dean’s heart with a kiss.

Dean never says anything when Cas does this. A few years ago, he would have shuddered at the thought of allowing a moment so intimate. Now, he just struggles to keep the breath in his lungs and the smile off his face.

The thing about Cas’s hands is that they’re _powerful_. Castiel has lightning crackling in the spaces between his fingers. He’s got planets on his fingertips, entire galaxies stored in his palms that exist solely to lend their strength when Cas needs it.

There was a time when Castiel did mighty things with his hands. It took years before Dean ever heard the story of Cas’s crusade into Hell to pull him out. Eventually, Cas told him about the weapons he wielded, the demons he slew, and finally, about the needle and thread he used (“It’s a _metaphor_ , Dean. Do you want to hear the story or not?”) to stitch Dean back together, one atom at a time. Afterword, Dean spent a long time just holding Castiel’s hands, brushing his knuckles with soft kisses and wondering how he could ever repay a deed like that.

Despite the mightiness of Cas, he has destroyed too. Dean still cringes sometimes, thinking about all the ways Cas can use his hands to destroy. Nowadays though, Cas doesn’t wield weapons or destroy. The days of fighting are over, both on Earth and in Heaven. Castiel has finally washed the blood off his hands.

In his heart, Cas is a creator. He grew restless when his hands were empty, which led to a long series of suggestions from Dean and Sam about how best to keep him occupied.

Dean first suggested cooking. For a while, it seemed to work; Castiel found some small satisfaction in deciphering recipes and hearing the Winchester’s appreciative _mmh_ s and _ahh_ s. But the problem, they soon discovered, was that food didn’t last. It was made, eaten, and then gone. Food wasn’t eternal the way Castiel was.

So Sam introduced him to music.  They dragged an old standup piano out from one of the many labyrinthine rooms in the Men of Letters bunker, and together Sam and Castiel spent several weeks restoring it. They fixed broken keys, tuned and re-tuned the whole thing at least three times over, and even spent some money getting the wood refurbished. Finally, it was presentable and capable of making music again, so Castiel decided to learn sheet music.

That wasn’t eternal enough for Castiel either.

“Music,” Castiel complained to Dean one night, “is beautiful while it lasts. I enjoy the compositions of others when I hear them, but the process of playing it myself is too taxing.” He grimaced, stretching his long, slender fingers out and then curling them back in. “Besides, my hands cramp up if I play too long.”

Dean had only chuckled and taken one of Cas’s hands, tangling his own fingers through the angel’s and holding it tightly. “It’s a shame,” he said. “You have great pianist fingers.”

Even when cooking and playing piano didn’t work, Cas’s hands still needed to be in constant motion. He simply had to do something, make something, _be_ something.

Eventually he found the art supplies, hidden away in one of the many storage rooms in the bunker nobody ever really went in. He found paints and pencils, charcoals and canvases, straightedges and brushes. He dragged them all out into the main room, babbling excitedly at a bemused Sam and Dean, who sort of shrugged and help him set up a space in one of the extra bedrooms to be his studio.

Castiel found his niche in art. It was crude at first; paint dripped clumsily onto canvas and charcoal smeared over scraps of paper. Most days he would come out of the studio looking more than a little annoyed, his hands covered in bright colors or thick, black smudges. But he always seemed happy despite that, and that was all it took for Dean to smile and help him clean up to prepare for the next project.

The thing about Cas’s art is that it doesn’t even matter to Dean what he creates.

Some days, he’s all Jackson Pollock – throwing paint angrily at a huge canvas laid on the floor with no discernible image in mind. Other days, Cas is Francis Bacon, producing terrifying depictions of war, heaven, hell, and purgatory; images of mass murder and mayhem that make Dean’s heart ache. More often than not, when Castiel paints this way, he includes himself in the chaos, taking part in the brutality. On the Jackson Pollock and the Francis Bacon days, Dean grabs Castiel tight around the shoulders and hugs him hard, whispering urgently about how _good_ Cas really is, how much he’s done to save humanity, how far he went to save Dean. 

Then there are the Helen Frankenthaler days or the Cy Twombly days that just remind Dean of how different, how _other_ Cas really is. These days are marked by deep, rumbling noises that echo from the studio and reverberate through the walls, setting Dean’s teeth on edge. It’s hard to remember sometimes just how much _more_ Castiel is than Dean. When Cas gets abstract, he loses his humanity and slips back into the angelic state he came from, creating images that Dean could only hope to understand. But Castiel reassures him, pointing to the scribbled bits of Enochian and angelic symbols he incorporates into these pieces to guide Dean toward a greater understanding.

But Dean’s favorite works though are Castiel’s still life drawings. Simple charcoal on small canvases and paper, those are the drawings that make Dean fall more and more in love with their artist every day. He can’t ever say quite why he likes the simple drawings the best; by comparison Cas has much better pieces. There’s just something about the drawings that pull Dean ever deeper into the ocean that is Castiel.

Maybe it’s because Cas lets him sit in the studio with him while he draws. When Cas paints, nobody is allowed inside the room until he’s finished. But when he draws, Cas will invite Dean in and have him sit on the little sofa in the corner while he works silently, bent over his easel and squinting at the page.

“Don’t you get cramped like that, Cas?” Dean asks sometimes, wondering how sitting like that for hours and constantly gripping pencils, pens, and charcoals can possibly feel any better than playing the piano did.

Castiel smiles then and stand up, often popping several joints in his spine, legs, and neck as he does so. “Yes,” he says before holding up the day’s work to show Dean.

The first time Cas draws Dean, Dean doesn’t expect it. He’s caught totally off-guard when Castiel holds up a portrait of Dean standing on a little dock off a lake, clinging to a sopping wet boy and clearly gasping for breath.

“You saved that boy’s life,” Castiel says quietly. “You didn’t know it then, but I was watching you that day. I hoped that one day I would get to tell you how much I admired that.”

Dean doesn’t say anything. He simply grabs Cas’s shirt and pulls him in, kissing him hard. When Cas’s charcoal-stained hands fist themselves into Dean’s white shirt, Dean just makes a satisfied noise and deepens the kiss further.

People always say that eyes are windows to the soul. Dean doesn’t agree. Cas’s hands, more than anything, reveal who he really is.

Castiel’s an artist.

 


End file.
